BoSacks: The Future Ain't What It Used to Be

Further we must stop thinking of the devices that we all hold every day, all day, as mere phones. Not even the term "smart phone" covers the depth and breadth of the evolving product line. If anything, Star Trek had it right: these devices are communicators and they communicate with everything. Every appliance, product, transportation vehicle, milk container, soda can, TV, and magazine that consumers purchase and engage with will be part of a larger, more extensive media channel of connected products. This internet of things (IOT) will have vast implications for the media business. We must integrate what we do with the IOT or we will be out of the media business as upstart information providers that understand the new world order of connecting things to media will completely take over.

Five years from now, when we look back at 2015 we will be amazed that what seems so obvious wasn't, and that the public's information consumption habits changed so quickly and radically from 2015 to 2020. The next five years for publishers will be filled with greater failures and also greater successes than the last five years. It all rests on the ability to have flexible business plans, tremendous foresight, and the will to give the public exactly what they want, when they want it. Because if you don't, someone else will.